Just a quick introduction- apropos and redundant I guess since this is the 'introduce yourself' portion of the boards.

I'm a nearly forty year old (boo, hiss!) woman, writer, photographer, painter, fiancee, pet-owner, and avid dreamer. I have been having incredibly detailed and vivid dreams since I was at least five years old, and for just as long I have been fascinated by dreams and dreaming.

The first dream I can actually recall happening was when I was living in a certain house in Utah. As we were only in that house while I was between the ages of four and six, I use five as my go-to age for the start of my dream experiences. I can still remember that dream in pretty much most detail, and at the time I had it I didn't know it was a dream but thought I was awake.

I was laying in my bed, propped against the pillows. My room was quiet and dark, and I could see my older sister asleep in the other small bed next to mine. There was a wind blowing through the room, so hard that it was pinning me there to my pillow and kept me from moving. I remember thinking that the wind was so loud, surely my sister had to hear it, but she didn't so much as stir. I also remember thinking that Mom would be rushing in any second to see what the noise was about, but that didn't happen either.

Instead, like a scroll, an image appeared floating above my bed, about four or five feet away from me. The image was about six feet long and about a foot high. It was like a window, or a television screen. Through it, I could see a very vivid desert, with bright blue sky and rolling, golden sand dunes. A woman's voice started to speak to me, telling me about this world that I was seeing, about its people and culture and history and what was happening in it. The picture kept changing, showing me all the different things it was talking about. I remember there was some sort of army that had come to the world and was trying to destroy its people. The army reminded me a lot of the soldiers in the movie Krull (which I saw much, much later) and the people who were native to that world reminded me kind of like a cross between rabbits and the Gelflings from Dark Crystal (which I had also not yet seen, it was released shortly after we moved out of that house. In fact, I remember watching it with my father in the theatre and getting excited when I saw the Gelflings. I tried to tell him I'd seen them before, but I couldn't really make myself clear, I don't think).

Over the years dreams like this have continued, quite a lot of them vast, epic storylines either wonderful or very dark. I remember I had dreams of this 'world' repeatedly for quite a long time until I turned about ten or twelve years old, then they slowly went away and were replaced by others.

My dreams and their 'storylines' were part of the reason I became a writer, and several have in fact inspired my books and art.

I also tend to ramble, so sorry about that. I have diarrhea of the pen.

So, anyway, lucid dreaming is nothing new to me, it's something that has happened on a regular basis since I was young, but its only recently I've decided to try and improve my lucid dreaming rate and dream recall. I'm disabled and part of my disability affects my memory and cognition, and the last year or so I've noticed that while still dreaming, my dream recall is becoming more and more spotty. It used to be I could remember most of a dream without an issue, now if I wake up even long enough to write it down or speak into a recorder it's all but gone just like that. I still have a few that I recall bits and pieces of but its nothing like it once was.

I've started old dream exercises again to help me remember my dreams as much as I can, and I've also started trying to improve my lucidity (as I seem to remember these most vividly and easily). I actually had a lucid dream last night which lead to me doing a search on hostility in lucid dreams, which lead to a thread here...and now here I am.

So, long story short...crazy creative type here, who can't shut up and has epic dreams.

I don't know if I'd call the dreams I had when I was five 'lucid' exactly...if by lucid it is meant that you are conscious within your dream and conscious that you ARE in fact dreaming. I had very vivid dreams starting then that I felt conscious in, but that's just the thing...I didn't realize I was dreaming, I thought I literally was conscious. It's only when I tried to explain it to other people that I got 'oh honey, you were just dreaming'.

So I don't know if that really qualifies as lucid? Yes? No? Maybe?

I no longer live in Utah either. I was only there for two years growing up, and the rest of my life has been in Washington state. Fortunately, there are several good, leading hospitals and practitioners here for my condition so that's a bonus

Very nice to meet you as well! It's good to know I'm not alone in my experiences. No one ever understood them when I was growing up, and now people don't seem to understand my perplexity at having them. I mean, having vivid and realistic dreams is one thing but what five year old has the background knowledge and experience to realistically 'create' a sci-fi dream world with a complete culture, politics, understands war, interstellar travel, etc. It was incredibly detailed and that's just the thing...at the age I was and the few experiences I had, I had no background to provide that detail, consciously or otherwise. That's what gets me still, but pretty much no one else I've ever talked to about it seems to think this is of any importance.

Oops, my bad. If you were controlling them, did you realize it enough that you were controlling them however?

No worries.

At first, I was just a passive observer. I thought it was really happening and I was really being shown things I didn't understand from someplace else. I grew up in a highly religious family so I wasn't all that surprised by them...being five years old I think you're also far more accepting of strange things happening than adults are. My annoyance was that some of them could be a little bit frightening and unsettling, and no matter how I tried to explain them to my family, they were dismissed as my imagination or that I was dreaming. Of course, I was, but to me I was having a very real experience and the people who were supposed to understand and guide such experiences were dismissive.

Now, of course, I understand being a grown-up but back then I was really irritated by it. Bleh. Remember what I said about having diarrhea of the pen? LOL.

So no. I didn't really control them nor did I realize I could control them at first. I was just a passive observer who thought I was conscious and awake. Later on...probably not more than a year or two, I realized I really was, in fact, dreaming when I actually woke up in the middle of one of these sessions. That's when I started trying to guide them and enter into the 'stories' that had previously just been shown to me.

I just get rather annoyed when some people consider living in Utah to be taboo. Utah is considered to be one of the most religious places on the planet by statistics (Islam and Iraq are the highest in religion, although Utah comes very close). However the reason why I have stayed in Utah for the same reason you have stayed in Washington. The U has developed an entire section just for people with mental issues. Including physical, medical, psychiatric, therapy, etc. And it makes going in there a little easier.

Nah, I don't consider living in Utah to be a taboo. I was there as a child because my grandmother lived there, and while my parents were separated my mother moved us there to be closer to her. When things resolved, we moved back to Washington. I liked living in Utah myself and I have a sister who still lives there. Of course, I'm not nearly as 'religious' as I used to be...more spiritual if that makes any sense.

As far as having dreams that look like reality, I have memorized WILDs that look shocking like reality as well. I have even left notes I have written on my dresser, only memorizing them once in reality, and I can remember what exactly I wrote on the notes. I can hardly believe how high in clarity these WILDs can be at times, although it was more shocking when I first had them than it is now. So I get where you are coming from with that, it is rather interesting when your dreams/Lucid Dreams get that high in clarity. Those ones can the most breath-taking.

I agree! I have only had a WILD once, and until I came to this site I didn't even know that's what it was or that other people had them! In my WILD I knew instantly I was dreaming, however, because I literally appeared at one of my reality checks.

It was the middle of the night, early AM. I woke up briefly which is not uncommon for me. Then I closed my eyes again and without the slightest loss of consciousness, zooop! I was standing, fully lucid, in the foyer of my childhood home, staring at the front door. All in perfect detail.

I dream often of my childhood home (it is the center of my 'dream map' which is another term I also learned here, wonderful to know other people have those too!) but doing so is an instant lucidity trigger I set years ago.

I think I actually said 'whoah, how did I do that??' and then opened the door and headed out to enjoy the dream, thrilled that I had jumped right into a dream without losing consciousness.

It hasn't ever happened again, but knowing its not just a fluke and it is something I can actually practice doing has lead me to put that on my goals list. I actually tried last night, and I think I got close. I got very focused, and then suddenly a 'woman' appeared right beside my head and shouted my name in my ear, as if amused. She appeared and shouted so suddenly that of course I startled and fully woke myself up. It was like a shotgun going off.

I did end up having a very vivid dream last night, what I like to call my 'epic story' dreams, but it wasn't lucid, alas.

Well, I sort of touched on one in the Dream Characters forum. Another very long lasting recurring dream I had formed the basis for another book (most of my recurring dreams end up in my books in one form or another ). I'm going to be incredibly brief in my description of these because I seriously could (and have) filled up pages and pages about them.

In this one, I would enter the woods near my house and if I stepped on a certain path, a river would appear out of nowhere, complete with boat. If I got into this boat and rode the river (which very often twisted and turned and looped in defiance of physics) I would pass through an African sort of landscape before arriving in a lake. The lake was a type of resort that belonged to me, with a grand riverboat in the middle of the lake where people could gamble, waterskiing and boating, amusement park rides, safaris out to see the animals, cabins and campgrounds that could be rented, shops, etc. Only this whole thing was a front to protect the opening to a parallel world where a Spark of Creation was hidden. Anyone who got hold of that spark could literally rewrite the whole of Creation with just a thought, and it was my job to guard it. So people and weird creatures were always trying to assault the resort and break through into this other dimension so they could get the Spark, and myself and varying groups of consistent but rotating DCs would have to stop them or hunt them down.

In another, I was the owner of a futuristic cyberpunk holo-resort set in a semi-post-apocalyptic urban underground urban city scape. People would rent 'booths' by the hour or by set time slots and they functioned sort of like the holodeck on Star Trek- allowing them to take the ultimate vacation or live out any fantasy they wanted. There were also virtual first person shooter 'arenas'. Repeatedly in this dream, a group of officials of some kind would hijack one of my resort booths to 'film' something that wasn't real but that they wanted the world to think was real, and I spied on them and found out what they were doing, stole the data, and I end up fighting my way through this massive urban landscape that crosses like three states, trying to get the data to the people who they were trying to deceive before the 'officials' can catch and kill me.

In yet another, I was the pilot of a space fighter during a massive war between Earth and an alien force. This one varied...sometimes I was on a space station, other times at an Academy or at a planetside military base...sometimes I was up fighting in my fighter, at other times I was just hanging out with the other pilots, or doing ground missions. This dream 'storyline' had (and still has) some of the most breathtaking scenery and imagry in it. It remains one of my favorites.

There is one I had recently that I want to discuss but I'm going to put it in a separate forum rather than here. I want to kind of get everyone's take on the matter. It's a unique kind of dream I have never, ever had before.